That’s because billionaires now thoroughly control an economy designed to “fabulously” enrich a privileged few by stealing the wealth that results when everyday toilers get low pay and substandard or nonexistent benefits.

Still, some regular folks, enduring painful exploitation under this reverse Robin Hood status, support rightwing con artists that FOX News and Rush Limbaugh shamelessly dupe them into backing.

It’s about as sensible as someone saying, “Jump off this bridge into those boulder-strewn, raging waters below. It’ll do wonders for your health!”

Lowering taxes for the upper crust and abolishing “onerous” government regulations on rapacious Big Business and High Finance is what they’re really asking, but the result would be just as lethal.

Let’s quit listening to manipulative propagandists’ disguised calls for our mass emasculation and complete impoverishment.

After all, further lavishing and empowering our oppressors would hardly improve our wretched lot.

When abolitionists, suffragettes, and labor organizers first emerged, parties who gained from mistreating blacks, women, and workers demonized those change-making activists.

They were slandered as being anti-American and un-Christian.

Sadly, similar charges are directed against homosexuals today, whose civil rights continue to be opposed with the same Bible-thumping false rectitude once used to defend slavery.

A bloody civil war had to be fought because part of the country couldn’t comprehend what Jesus really stood for, preferring benighted bigotry instead.

Much later, in a laudable reversal, many citizens opposed the Vietnam war because they were conscientiously convinced that napalming Southeast Asian civilians into smoldering heaps of cinders and ash wasn’t a Godly thing to do.

For holding that view, they were labeled “smelly hippies” and “Marxists.”

Today, as the growing Occupy movement protests Wall Street’s plunder of our country’s wage-earning majority, it also gets called dirty names. Exactly the same names that ’60s war resisters were called.

Given all this, could it be that the slanderers secretly wish they could still own other human beings? Or prevent females from voting? They’re certainly anti-union.

Just wondering…

Thank you, conservatives, for revealing to us that the 99% movement is nothing but a bunch of crybaby/loser/Bolshevik members of a silly “Flea Party.”

Now we no longer have to worry about capitalists getting obscenely bloated while typical workers’ billfolds virtually disappear when viewed sideways.

What a relief it is to ignore the correlation between the length of fat cats’ yachts and the shortening time many millions of us have before going hopelessly broke.

Instead, we can fulminate against “irresponsible” young people protesting exorbitant college tuition costs, and lifelong student-loan debt, as they try to become educated for jobs that likely won’t even exist when they graduate.

What’s with value-less, complaining kids these days anyhow?

Now that we’ve seen the light, we can hardly wait till Newt Gingrich becomes President and brings back child labor, which he recently advocated at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

After all, there’s nothing wrong with America that a little Dickensian discipline for spoiled brats won’t fix!

Right?

(Extreme right, actually…)

Where in the First Amendment are tents and sleeping bags prevented from being used by American citizens as they peacefully assemble in public places to seek redress of compelling grievances?

Such a prohibition doesn’t exist, of course.

But that isn’t stopping mayors of several cities from behaving like foreign despots as they attempt to quash the Occupy cause, which resists the increasingly Third World-like economic inequity that having our lives ruled by upper crust thieves has painfully visited upon countless U.S. households.

Pitiful wages, lousy benefits, and pepper-sprayed violations of basic liberty are becoming the overall norm, while exploitative oligarchs ostentatiously luxuriate in gated communities.

Winding up essentially indistinguishable from the downtrodden, tyrannized “wretched of the earth” shouldn’t be our collective fate.

Join Occupy and the 99% to demand a different, better outcome for ourselves and our progeny!

Besides being utterly ridiculous, that outlook works against their own professed interest.

After all, practical solutions to today’s many societal problems will necessarily come from that part of the ideological ground not being trod by clown shoes or neo-Nazi jackboots.

Those who’ve incessantly been described as commie traitors to all that’s good, decent, and properly American will actually be the ones who’ll save our country from collapse in the end.

Much to the appreciation of grateful masses: “Well, if socialism means getting my job and home back, and having affordable healthcare and a solid pension, then I’m all for it!”

Chalk that up as a big, forfeited victory for real revolutionaries tickled pink by the Right’s unwitting validation of the long-standing Marxist claim that capitalism in global, systemic crisis becomes so beset by limiting contradictions that it can’t simultaneously meet the profit lust of a corporate/financial elite and the wage-earning majority’s crying human needs.

Each time some wildly irresponsible conservative insists that tax loopholes larger than the rings of Saturn for the mega rich shouldn’t be closed, but that social safety net programs vital to the beleaguered masses need drastic cutting, old Karl’s ghost shakes its head in incredulous wonder.

The myopic Right is blindly working overtime to prove Marxism’s central claim, namely that capitalism in its moribund monopoly stage is utterly incompatible with fair play and justice, that the rich will get richer and the poor poorer, and that the disintegrating “free market” hand basket will completely fall apart before it gets even halfway to Hell.

During the devastating travails of the Great Depression, the intimate organizing connection that the U.S. Communist Party had with America’s unemployed made it definitely look like a Yankee variation of the Bolshevik revolution would happen here.

Franklin Roosevelt recognized that threat, however, and had the wisdom to co-opt Communist demands by absorbing them into his New Deal, thus giving American capitalism continuing decades of being able to derive benefit from its golden goose — a mass proletariat still subject to routine under-compensation for the true value of the wealth its daily labor creates.

Now, the Republican axis is determined to decimate the entire New Deal legacy, leaving everyday people with nothing as protection or crucial service precisely when predatory exploitation by the capitalist hierarchy is at its worst.

Without the least bit of heart, and even less critical sense, Rick Perry and others of his benighted ilk are adamant in insisting that profit-dripping bosses and banksters not offer a dime to help pay for the economic crisis their own avarice, ineptitude, and criminality created.

The cost should be borne, instead, by old folks on fixed incomes, by impoverished urban residents and the rural destitute, by students in classrooms with leaking roofs and not enough books, and by working-class mothers who open kitchen cupboards at suppertime to just a few remaining cans of vegetables and some Raman noodles.

The guilty few get off entirely free; the innocent multitudes collectively suffer.

Hasn’t that colossal inequity been the essential impetus for every great revolutionary uprising in recorded history?

You can be sure that an untenable status quo is irrevocably at the end of its rope when its most ardent defenders become so bereft of viable options that everything they say and do actually enables and advances precisely that which they most despise and fear.

The teetering, soon-to-collapse “free market” system is just as definitely doomed.

If there’s any difference between the two, convicts facing electrocution or lethal injection often summon reserves of strength and go to their fates with dignified bravery.

That’s not the case, however, with about-to-die capitalism.

It lashes out with last-gasp desperation, as seen in grotesque efforts to save corporate/financial super profitability by attacking workers’ union rights, cutting funding for education and healthcare, and wildly slashing all social safety nets upon which ordinary people enduring worsening societal deprivation vitally depend.

As its days on earth wind down, greedy capitalism actually creates conditions that hasten the moment of its demise.

It never occurs to capitalists to seek a stay of execution, for instance, which might be achieved by being less avaricious and granting some concessions and benefits that would give the mass populace the needed confidence and buying power to keep the economy functioning.

No.

Capitalists attempt to futilely solve the impossible contradictions their profits-before-people ideology creates by brazenly robbing the multitudes, while huffing and puffing under the immense weight of their stolen booty, not realizing that a citizenry left impoverished by their unfettered selfishness can’t buy back what society produces.

They’re wringing the neck of their own Golden Goose through their money-mad behavior.

It’s amusing — though decidedly pathetic on another level — how right-wing reactionaries label every proposal coming from those even slightly to the left of their own position on the political spectrum as “Marxist.”

They then work overtime to eviscerate each governmental effort to properly serve the public — as Congressman Paul Ryan is currently doing with his barbaric assault on Medicare and Medicaid — revealing the abject cruelty of their one-sided class warfare, which then plays directly into the hands of actual Marxists.

“See, capitalism in terminal crisis can’t simultaneously meet the profit lust of billionaires and the crying human needs of our nation’s wage-earning majority. Every Wall Street bailout, combined with relentless attacks on beleaguered Main Street residents, proves it. Socialist revolution is the only way to keep food on your kitchen table and a roof over your family’s head.”

Not everyone will immediately accept that revolutionary assessment, but as time passes and things go from very bad to much worse, an almost automatic radicalization will take place.

Particularly as slash-and-burn extremists like Scott Walker and other Republican governors defund everything that benefits mom, dad, and the kids, while constantly giving breaks bigger than the rings of Saturn to a tiny minority of socially irresponsible oligarchs.

A half-million protesters recently rallied in London to express outrage over the harsh austerity that’s being forcefully imposed on majority Britons by a thoroughly out-of-touch, exploitative English ruling hierarchy.

Those demonstrators marched under an assortment of red banners. They sang an array of militant, inspirational anthems long associated with the true Left.

Now that sentiment has spread to central plazas in Spain, and will certainly expand from there.

Given that capitalism is global, and because its death throes affect us all, it’s a sure bet that we too will see such mammoth street actions in the period ahead.

As a huge, growing movement demands fundamental change, capitalists will even more intolerably steal from us to try to compensate for wealth that an irreparably broken order can no longer generate by less severe means.

They’ll also try outright repression, which international multitudes already in powerful democratic rebellion surely will not tolerate.

So capitalism limps and staggers forward, headed for the same fall that both slavery and feudalism experienced when objective possibilities for their continuation finally ran out.

In one way, it’s ineffably sad.

In another, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to our species.

It shines not only with Fighting Bob La Follette’s forceful defense of worker and farmer rights against cruel depredation by robber barons at the tail end of the Gilded Age.

It includes, also, the sterling record of efficient, honest municipal governments in Milwaukee and several other cities headed by socialist mayors, mainly of immigrant German origin, who were steadfastly devoted to serving society’s wage-earning majority, its indispensable backbone.

Up north, there were the Finnish-American labor partisans who organized an influential publishing house, consumer cooperatives in communities throughout the region, and collective sports and theater activity even in the smallest rural towns.

Then there’s Wisconsin’s capital, which affectionately came to be known as the People’s Republic of Madison during the turbulent Vietnam years, when its great university and surrounding area were an effective liberated zone where imperialist assumptions of the time stood no chance against popular, countervailing truth.

And let’s not forget Gaylord Nelson, former senator and governor, the visionary co-founder of Earth Day.  On the fortieth anniversary of his green creation, one billion people in 190 countries gently honored our shared, fragile planet.

Which brought smiles to the faces of Wisconsin’s native Ojibwe, whose spiritual outlook calls for decisions in the present that benefit seven generations to come.

My home state’s powerful legacy of ordinary folks’ exemplary struggle for better lives and justice has come full circle, linking with itself and giving dramatic strength to all who are rising by the many thousands to resist Scott Walker’s maniacal imitation of a Guatemalan or Honduran coup.

I just returned from an emergency protest that was held in quick response to the underhanded and illegal destruction of Wisconsin unions’ collective bargaining rights by Koch-funded Republican reactionaries.

Similar rallies took place in over a dozen of Wisconsin’s leading cities.

Never have I seen such anger, or as much steely determination to undo a grievous wrong.

Importantly, in decades of taking to the streets for various good causes, never has there been as much, virtually constant horn honking by supportive motorists, many of whom pumped clenched fists in fervent solidarity.

Wisconsin’s masses are livid with rage.

They won’t accept this crypto-fascistic assault on their democracy, and on everything Wisconsin has so magnificently represented to so many for so long.

Thanks to the time bought by the Wisconsin 14, the Democratic state senators who went to Illinois to prevent an initial voting quorum, Wisconsinites have amply been able to familiarize themselves with what Walker’s dreadful bill contains:

• the unconscionable attack on collective bargaining;
• the devastating monetary reductions for school districts;
• the inhumane cuts on BadgerCare health assistance to the poor; and,
• the giveaway provision whereby state power plants and other public facilities can be sold to private entities without a proper bidding process.

And, while Walker has demagogued the “deficit” issue, Wisconsinites have angrily absorbed realities about who actually put their state — and the whole nation — into deep debt, and what can best be done about it.

Statistics such as the following are profoundly radicalizing:

Based on Forbes magazine data, the 2011 budget-deficit total for all 50 states is roughly one-tenth the net worth of the 400 richest Americans.

In New Jersey, there are 100,000 more millionaires than teachers, but it’s those teachers who get blamed for state debt, not the massive tax-evasion capacity of the super rich.

Let’s go after the money where it is, not where it isn’t.

Make the wealthy pay to save the USA!

Such sentiment is very widely held in Wisconsin.  In fact, only a rapidly shrinking minority of ultra-conservative Fox News patsies thinks otherwise.

The coming days will see marches, rallies, occupations, strikes, law suits, recall-election petitioning, peaceful civil disobedience, plus methods of protest that will be highly imaginative and totally unique.

What they’ll all display will be the awesome power of Wisconsinites who just got dumped on by contemptible corporate lackeys, and who’ll unite to fully draw upon their noble working-class history to ultimately set things right.

That’s not idle brave talk.

It’s a promise you can bank on!

Is there a decent, fair-minded person on this planet who doesn’t extend immense solidarity toward those brave souls standing their ground in Tahrir Square and elsewhere, in the face of the most cruelly brutal violence that dictator Hosni Mubarak’s mercenary thugs can sadistically muster?

As of this writing, Egypt’s titanic battle between the forces of rectitude and evil, light and darkness, liberty and despotism — between a wretched past and bright possibilities tomorrow — is still very much in doubt.

We would like to believe, of course, that the good guys (plus women and children) will soon win.

But humanity’s annals are stained with the blood of countless causes, plainly righteous and so seemingly certain of quick victory, that were cut to shreds by monarchs, tyrants, imperialists, pious believers in this religion or that, etc., who unleashed decimating barbarism to crush challenges to their diabolical rule.

Mubarak seems to fairly drip with the defiant malice characteristic of justly hated past rulers who found themselves backed into corners by advancing progress, only to savagely beat their way out, at terrible cost to thousands, if not tens of thousands.

If confronted with a choice between ouster or slaughter, I fear he’ll choose the latter.

The Egyptian people will eventually triumph, but we should prepare our sensibilities for the searing possibility that their day of rapturous joy may come only after an agonizing period of sharp setbacks.and grim funerals.

News reports tell of snipers now being employed by the Mubarak gang to wantonly murder pro-democracy activists in open areas, at lower elevations.

As difficult as it is to imagine or accept, even more morally depraved means may be used in a surpassingly wicked attempt to kill emerging democracy.

Perhaps, and hopefully, such outrages will spur decisive players beyond the current streets to take necessary action.  We wish that conscientious soldiers would burst into Mubarak’s hiding place and force his removal, along with his like-minded underlings.

Whatever pressure the world’s watching people can exert in furtherance of Egyptian popular success must quickly, fully be brought to bear.

Let’s completely understand that democracy in the abstract isn’t what this momentous rebellion is actually about.

It’s about gaining the democratic means to correct staggering economic injustice that allows a tiny societal minority to sit in luxurious leisure beside lavish swimming pools in gated communities while the majority populace toils in sweatshops, or squats on the ground, begging for meager sustenance.

That Third World commonality is something we ourselves can very closely come to expect under increasingly reactionary political influence that insists on imposing harsh “austerity”
on our own masses.

Just so corporate/financial hierarchs can continue to obscenely, excessively profit.

Cairo’s outcome in the relatively near future may be New York’s or Chicago’s not that far down the timeline, so we must do everything we can, today, to assure that the greatest gains for the largest number can be realized through the most peaceful means by this planet’s everyday multitudes.

We’re all Egyptians now.

Moreover, according to the Government Accountability Office, neither did two-thirds of  U.S. corporations during recent years.

Also, roughly 40,000 American factories shut down during the past decade, often to rip off sweatshop employees overseas.

If the mega rich didn’t have tax evasion loopholes larger than a gaudy, whirling Ferris wheel — and if they possessed sufficient patriotism to hire Americans (at fair wages and with decent benefits) — there’d be much less national debt for right wing Republicans to demagogically point to in outrageously scapegoating public service unions, Social Security, and Medicare.

Just as typical workaday citizens obviously couldn’t be blamed for the Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom debacles that occurred earlier in this century, they certainly aren’t at fault for the housing bubble/derivatives fiasco that tanked our economy not that long ago.

School teachers, firefighters, sanitation workers, librarians, nurses, and police officers didn’t send Wall Street into a calamitous tailspin in the autumn of 2008.

Why should they, and we, be forced to compensate for an irresponsible oligarchy’s greed-created crisis?

Why should fat cats continue to sit on mountains of profit, derived through blatantly exploiting their workforces and consumers, while the U.S. majority grows more financially insecure and fearful with each passing day?

There’s only one solution to what will otherwise be a constant, complete shafting of everyone in this country who doesn’t luxuriate in plush, gated communities, with dutiful lobbyists and political reactionaries securely inside their silk-lined vest pockets.

As rebellious Europeans and North Africans facing similar assaults on their living standards have encouragingly demonstrated, a militant response is mandatory.

The time for decisive popular action is now.

Let’s cut across ultimately inconsequential divisions — race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. — and seamlessly unite to passionately defend labor, seniors, students, the ill, and all others targeted for brutal sacrifice by those shamefully unwilling to bear the appropriate cost of their own mammon-worshipping sins.

With deep disgust, we’ve witnessed treasonous betrayal by those who owe allegiance to the Almighty Dollar instead of serving the American common good.

We, the people, have the properly patriotic answer.

Eight words need to be emblazoned on our banners and chanted so loudly in street rallies from coast to coast that the plate glass windows on monopoly capitalism’s skyscraping bastions will visibly vibrate with the resonance of our rising, eminently justified rage.

“Make the wealthy pay to save the USA!”

In most cases, there’s a direct link connecting palatial estates in plush, gated communities to deteriorating working-class neighborhoods, either here or abroad, where people who toil too hard in their bosses’ enterprises, for too little pay and scant benefits, experience lives ranging from merely hard-pressed to desperately poor.

It’s a one-way pipeline through which the value created by ordinary folks’ blood, sweat, and tears at the daily job site is routinely appropriated in its greatest part, leaving little left over for the actual producers.

The owning class sucks “its” wealth from those who make the things, or deliver the services that business owners profitably sell without an instant’s thought to the reality that veritable wage slaves on the shop floor are responsible for the lavish “rewards” that they so ostentatiously enjoy.

For every tycoon being chauffeured about in a Rolls Royce, there are hundreds of haggard souls driving rusting clunkers, or using creaking donkey carts, who put in often egregiously under-compensated time in factories, mines, mills, and retail counters to make the magnate’s enormous prosperity possible.

Which is why global working-class revolution, never mind half-hearted measures to try to hike taxes on the upper crust, will be entirely justified, if strict emphasis on economic justice is the deciding factor.

As should properly be the case.

I’m definitely pacifistic by nature and count Gandhi, King, and Mandela as the only true giants who’ve walked the earth during my lifetime.  Violence is abhorrent to me.

But I’m also convinced that any bloodshed that rectifying rebellion entails, after everyday families have exhausted all peaceful possibilities for necessary change, will be mild in comparison to the ongoing violence that capitalist exploitation inflicts on international multitudes day in and day out.

That violence takes the form of widespread, withering poverty, grimly manifested in pervasive hunger, a lack of elemental health care, spreading homelessness, inferior or nonexistent education, and the cumulative impact of profits-before-people priorities that give millions of children around the globe cruelly compelling reason to cry.

Far too often, weeping is their last act, as death arrives to steal their futures and simultaneously condemn the wicked, rapacious system that made their lives so mercilessly impossible.

A planetary revolution is assuredly, unavoidably coming.

It’ll be a united uprising by both what Frantz Fanon termed the Third World’s “wretched of the earth” and industrialized nations’ outraged proletarians, unwilling to sacrifice their living standards on the altar of “austerity,” just so a few fat cats can continue luxuriating to an unconscionable degree.

This impending cleansing of our capitalism-putrefied cosmic home will be openly socialist in those countries where leftist thought and theory have long had fertile ground in which to grow.  Europe will go unequivocally red, for instance.

In places like the United States, however, a kind of instinctive, spontaneous Marxism will initially arise, as it’s occasionally done during our historical past, in a localized way

The primary example of this is how white, Christian, and ordinarily quite conservative coal miners in Kentucky and West Virginia were forced by their chronically exploitative circumstances to take on plundering coal companies with tactics and ideological underpinnings of economic fairness that could have been advocated — and, in fact, were — by communists.

Anyone who views the award-winning documentary film “Harlan County, USA” will quickly understand that blue-collar souls who adhere to cynical diversions (such as those posited by today’s Tea Party) will break with their wrong beliefs to become impassioned battlers for real worker advancement as mass consciousness and resulting action grow.

Struggle itself is the decisive teacher and key radicalizing agent.

All of this is more true now than ever.

What’s been derisively termed “The Cat Food Commission” recently issued its list of extensive cuts to already intolerable American living standards that we’ll be asked to accept so that criminally corrupt Wall Street banksters and corpulent corporate honchos can keep their second or third luxurious residences, and yachts.

We, the creators of the wealth that they stole, are expected to make an ungodly trade-off, compliantly absorbing what amounts to a total abandonment of everything that constitutes either an existing or anticipated “good life.”

This impoverish-my-kids-so-that-capitalists-can-flourish “solution” just isn’t going to fly.

And yet, due to the thoroughly depraved nature and ruthlessness of capitalism in its moribund imperialist stage, America’s reactionary elite will repeatedly attempt to send that dead albatross into the air.

At some point, much sooner than many think, the masses will just revolt in angry disgust.

That’s when the New York Stock Exchange will be set ablaze.

In a dramatic foretaste of things to come, English protesters enraged by exorbitant college tuition hikes recently attacked the limousine carrying Prince Charles and Lady Camilla, with accompanying shouts of “Off with their heads!”

Sentiments equally as bitter have risen in several countries.  Super-exploited multitudes have reached their breaking point.

The entire capitalist world is but a hair’s breadth away from wholesale rebellion.

“Reds” of assorted affiliations were incessantly telling us how capitalism in its imperialist stage was fatally compromised and doomed, intricately detailing the reasons why, and heavily underscoring the inevitability of the coming collapse.

But we were impatient and accustomed to instant results. We consequently dismissed those claims because they didn’t materialize at once, or even relatively soon.

Who could anticipate that many decades would pass before the “stuff” fully hit the proverbial fan?

Defenders of the bourgeois status quo, on the other hand, were so hostilely contemptuous of anything smacking of socialism that they wouldn’t deign to study, or take seriously, Marxist analysis, regardless of how cogent its penetrating view.

Commies could have tipped them off to their economic folly, but hubris and supremacism prevented it.

I recall reading, for instance, a paperback critique by Gus Hall, General Secretary of the Communist Party, USA. It was entitled Capitalism on the Skids to Oblivion.

Through very deductive and quite persuasive reasoning, he pointed out that the capitalist owning class’s constant campaign to reduce labor costs was unwitting suicide for the Wall Street set.

If bosses hold back workers’ wages, eliminate benefits, bust labor unions, saddle toilers with that portion of taxes the rich avoid through cavernous loopholes, etc., they may profit obscenely in the short run.

But ultimately a point is reached — very much like the situation we’re faced with today — where the societal majority gets sufficiently impoverished by relentless exploitation that people, by the many millions, become unable to buy back what a country produces.

The ensuing “overproduction crisis” triggers recession, and depression, and finally a broad, revolutionary awareness that capitalism is incapable of serving public welfare and the common good.

Reds also revealed how the depraved capitalist impulse of ripping off others for profit thoroughly corrupts a society on all levels, engendering festering decadence that rots culture to its core.

One need only surf America’s cable television channels to see the offensively tawdry entertainment, vile scandals, blatant hucksterism, and other pervasive negatives that have come to constitute our sick “values.”

Capitalism has plainly reached the end of its rope. It can sustain increasing levels of profitability — upon which its very survival depends — only by imposing harsh austerity on the world’s laboring multitudes, as the International Monetary Fund and similar institutions are currently, cruelly doing, with devastating impact.

That forced, collective sacrifice to save a relatively few oligarchic skins is infuriating workers everywhere, most dramatically in rebellious Greece, and it’s just a matter of time before the entire global proletariat rises in fury, understandably unwilling to have its living standards decimated simply because Fat Cats want to continue laughing all the way to the bank.

Whether the Marxists’ communist ideal can ever be gotten right and made to successfully function is definitely open to vigorous debate.

But their dissection of monopoly capitalism was so precise that you’d think they’d been reading our mail.

Good and evil have traded places, an astonishing transition brought about by concretizing the “Never Again!” reaction to what European Jewry experienced under Hitler to such a dogmatic hard line, myopically advanced by an increasingly extremist Israeli leadership, that much of Israel’s population simply can’t recognize what’s plainly evident to most of the rest of the world.

Namely, that its constant refusal to accede to the moral imperative of a unitary Palestinian homeland — always brutally rejected with the facile “threat to Israel’s existence” rationale — objectively makes the Jewish state our planet’s worst, most unyielding human rights violator at this moment in time.

As it has been, unconscionably, for the past sixty years.

It’s that crazed one-sidedness, the bastard product of errant emotion and worse politics, that made Israel think it was correct to dispatch helicopter-borne commandos, with guns blazing, onto a humanitarian aid flotilla peacefully moving through international waters at night.

It’s why Gaza is cruelly, illegally blockaded in the first place, as collective punishment for its populace freely voting to be represented by Hamas, which has resulted in vengefully savage deprivation having to be endured within one of the most densely-packed locales on earth.

The impact of that vengeance should offend everyone.

In late 2009, 60 percent of Gazans were “food insecure,” as determined by the UN’s World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization.  An additional 17 percent were deemed susceptible to food insecurity.

The UN Relief and Works Agency notes:

The number of Palestine refugees completely unable to secure access to food and lacking the means to purchase even the most basic items, such as soap, school stationary and safe drinking water…has tripled since the imposition of the blockade in June 2007.

Two-thirds of those facing hunger are children, who suffer escalating levels of malnutrition and stunted growth. Anemia among infants aged 9 to 12 months reaches 65.5 percent, according to a World Health Organization appraisal.

Due to the blockade, there’s been virtually no reconstruction of homes obliterated in the 2008-09 Israeli attack upon Gaza. The UN Development Program points out that, a year after that assault ended, at least 20,000 Palestinians were still displaced from the almost 3,500 homes the Israeli aggressors destroyed. Less than 20 percent of schools had been rebuilt.

Let’s not forget that Gaza is where globally outlawed white phosphorus descended,  bringing fiery death to noncombatant civilians screaming in terror below, as just the most egregious portion of the many war crimes that Israel was documented by Human Rights Watch, and others, to have engaged in during Operation Cast Lead.

What’s especially galling is how Israel, and its unabashed apologists, invariably resort to the use of one odious charge against their critics, no matter how valid their complaints actually are, to attempt to obviate their credibility.

They’re always said to be anti-Semitic ranters, never mind how much blood of innocents sickeningly covers Israeli hands!

When people of good will and conscience from all corners of the earth arrive at the same outraged conclusions, based on an insistence that morality not be chopped to pieces by double standards, they’re simply dismissed as Jew haters.

But, right along, both within Israel and elsewhere, countless progressive Jews have been at the forefront of principled protest.   They clearly appreciate that the surest way to spread the most viral, true anti-Semitism is for Israel to continue policies that make Jews seem to fully conform with the worst stereotypes that have often been maliciously hurled their way.

This much should be very evident:

The most reactionary elements of the Israeli Knesset and the ultraconservative Netanyahu clique can’t be right while all those incensed multitudes protesting in streets and public squares in far-flung countries are wrong.

Reality reveals the precise opposite.

The key difference in all this is that Israel’s retrograde leaders have Gaza in their bomb sights, and squeezed within the stranglehold of a dreadful embargo, while those calling for an end to the terrible depredations and denials imposed upon it, and on all Palestinians, hold Gaza in their hearts.

Universal solidarity supporting eminently just causes may see passionately desired success temporarily deferred, but the fine impulses behind the best human sentiments invariably triumph.

Of this we can be assured…

Freedom is coming to Gaza, and a fully independent Palestine will unquestionably rise!

An exploding coal mine and a burning oil rig both inflicted horrible mayhem, with the latter also unleashing a mammoth environmental disaster.

Our jobs are going out the window, leaving homes we can no longer afford to own, and the entire Greek working class is being shafted as a precursor for ordinary folks in all nations, just to save a few bankers’ greedy hides.

US streets are full of potholes, libraries are closing or reducing hours, schools are crumbling, and police and fire protection slides from bad to worse because of local governmental insolvency.

The obscenely rich don’t pay their proper share of taxes, not to mention fair wages for the workaday producers of all societal wealth.

What money we should be spending for human needs is instead squandered on endless wars and the roughly eight hundred military bases or active sites we operate around the planet, which justifiably generate increasing global hatred toward our country.

We’re faced with staggering inequity and injustice, but we’re asked to blame impoverished immigrants without documentation, who possess a hunger in their empty bellies that the rest of us have yet to experience, but surely will, if seamless working-class unity isn’t achieved.

Do straws in the wind have to become the size of hurricane-tossed tree branches before we can see what’s happening? Must the dots we should be connecting be iridescent orange and larger than medicine balls?

Or are we hopelessly hypnotized by diversionary GOP and Tea Party demagoguery?

Capitalism has run amok. It’s destroying everyone’s livelihoods and lives.

The system we were indoctrinated to blindly venerate in grammar school has proven to be a relentlessly pillaging, profiteering assault on public welfare, the common good, and Mother Earth, itself.

Our only salvation is to curb monopolies, bust trusts, enact worker and consumer protections with razor-sharp teeth, plus foster a prevailing mentality that environmental defense is absolutely key to universal survival.

If that can’t be achieved within a continuing capitalist context — which becomes more unlikely with each passing day — then aren’t we obligated to move toward a truly liberating super democracy that would give the overwhelming majority of adult Americans and their foreign peers — wage-earning workers everywhere — the decisive say over their own existence?

No longer would Jesus-offending, mammon-worshipping Fat Cats run things and grow rich at our painful expense.

No longer would Main Street jobs, homes, and pensions be cruelly sacrificed at Dow Jones’ ungodly altar.

We need to speak with one, reverberatingly loud voice that can’t possibly be ignored.

Either make the system serve this nation’s and the world’s laboring backbone, or face the eventual prospect of a complete takeover by the people themselves, of their mines, mills, and factories, consistent with revolutionary rights mandated by dire need.

Grim reality provides stark evidence of how intolerable the status quo has become. The sinister truth is literally lapping our ankles as we stroll Gulf Coast beaches.

It’s crunch time for capitalism.

Can it change its destructive character today, or must workers seize control tomorrow and show everyone what finally has to be done?

More recently, an incensed global community assisted Nelson Mandela and his courageous freedom fighters in abolishing a despised apartheid system infamous for the “pass books” that South African blacks always had to have in their possession.

Now, via the signature of Arizona’s Republican governor, police in that state, where children continue to recite a flag pledge that ends with “with liberty and justice for all,” will have the totalitarian authority to profile Hispanics or “foreign-looking” people, and demand to see their documentation, at arbitrary whim.

As a 13-year-old Latino citizen from Phoenix told the Associated Press, “It’s going to change our lives. We can’t walk to school anymore. We can’t be in the streets without the pigs thinking we’re illegal immigrants.”

The measure means that countless brown-skinned souls will be politically, legally and economically discriminated against, and effectively segregated.

Remarkably, this profoundly unconstitutional lurch toward tyranny will not be protested, in the least, by white Tea Party types who show up at rallies with holstered handguns and huge placards declaring “Don’t tread on me!”

Their only concern is the demented belief that freedom’s erosion in this nation comes from a duly-elected President they crazily see as being either a Kenyan by birth, a Muslim, a Marxist, or the anti-christ.

Stewing in unacknowledged racism, their prejudice poisonously floods the immigration issue. Totally absent from their understanding is this pivotal truth:

Nearly 200 million people work outside their countries of birth, and an equal number are migrants inside their own countries. Nativists blame immigrants for flat wages, scarce jobs, and our declining labor movement. However, the responsibility lies with corporations that launched an all-out assault on wages and unions in the 1970s — well before today’s wave of migration began…The IMF and World Bank reproduced this scenario around the world, driving down wages and worker rights in at least 90 countries under IMF ‘structural adjustment programs.’ Immigrants aren’t destroying the ‘blue collar middle class,’ corporations are. — Center for Labor Renewal Statement on Worker Migration

It’s in every wage-earning American’s best bread-and-butter interest to make common cause with all minorities to gain the pivotal strength that, alone, will give us the united power to curb monopolies, bust trusts, and end divisive hatreds so useful to those who constantly plunder Main Street to lavish Wall Street.

Terrorizing darker-skinned folks whose worst “crime” might be fleeing the poverty that global economic injustice perpetuates in their places of birth — to find a dubiously better life toiling from sun to sun in dusty Southwestern farm fields — is entirely wrong, and ultimately self-defeating.

It was Jesus who said, “As you do unto the least of these, so too you do unto me.”

And it was Martin Luther King who echoed an age-old axiom that liberty denied to some places chains around us all.

Absolute clarity, and coordinated protest, are now urgently required to reverse this alarming move that comprises the most shameful, dangerous assault on our national freedom since Japanese Americans were interned in concentration camps many decades ago.

Progressives might have asked a different question:  “What was the bravest, most inspiring people’s struggle against seemingly (or actually) impossible odds?”

Some would choose the doomed-to-fail effort of the volunteer International Brigades to defeat incipient fascism during the Spanish Civil War.  Nothing equals their awesome courage to take on Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler in defense of liberty and the Spanish Republic.

Others feel the honor definitely goes to the Vietnamese, who had the unwavering fortitude and will to vanquish three imperialist powers in succession, the Japanese, the French, and the Americans.

This article’s purpose is to recognize the place Vietnamese women hold in that magnificent legacy.

That female Vietnamese soldiers were fighting for their nation’s freedom was evident to anyone who paid attention to news footage in the Sixties and Seventies.  We’d see them in their helmets, eyes trained skyward, as they hurriedly aimed anti-aircraft guns at approaching U.S. aircraft sent on cruel, indiscriminate bombing missions.

Or they’d be filmed running across rice paddies, carrying nothing but the AK-47s that became the feared nemesis of invading American troops.

One of the best war movies ever made, Full Metal Jacket, features a riveting scene in which a U.S. soldier and a Vietnamese woman fight to the bloody death.  She loses, but he is deeply affected by her sacrificial tenacity.

Quite awhile back, the National Geographic Channel presented a documentary on Vietnamese combat photographers, one of whom was the only person from either side to be able to take pictures in the terrible battle for Quang Tri in 1972.

His access to the heart of that city was made possible only because he was escorted across treacherous terrain by two 17-year-old Vietnamese militia women,”beautiful and brave,” about whose ultimate fate he was deeply concerned.

Having already fought in two wars against foreign aggressors, Vietnamese females played a pivotal role in beating the third.

Beyond involvement in direct combat, they transported war equipment, medicine, and food to the frontlines, and took over traditional male jobs to free more men for battle.  They also participated in clandestine and specialized activities requiring remarkable courage.

Vietnamese movie director Luu Trong Ninh devoted his 1997 film, The Crossing at Dong Loc, to a team of young women entrusted to detonate U.S. bombs that hadn’t exploded on impact. He emphasized their high-spirited vitality, hardly the expected emotion for anyone charged with so grimly dangerous a task.

In the South, Buddhists and various “third force” women played a very important role. They advocated peace, organized demonstrations, and in some cases, set themselves ablaze to dramatically protest Vietnam’s colonized status and puppet-regime corruption.

Personal stories from the era are nothing short of astounding.

Hoang Thi Nghi was already a seasoned veteran of anti-French struggle when she was assigned to southern Vietnam to prepare for impending U.S. intervention.

She was instrumental in establishing and running a major network of moles and sympathizers within Saigon forces until 1969, when she was betrayed and sent to Con Dao prison, known as “Hell on Earth.”

Over 500 women were eventually held at Con Dao, all charged with political crimes. Despite routine torture, they resisted at every possible chance. “We would hurl cans of urine at them. If they retaliated with tear gas grenades, we would just throw them back.”

When Saigon was liberated on April 30, 1975, Nghi’s group foiled a plot to use mines to blow up the entire compound and kill all of its inmates.

Individual heroism in behalf of the Vietnamese people’s collective cause was common.

Ngo Thi Tuyen was a local militia woman who became a legend. Honored for numerous sacrifices, she is especially remembered for having transported two boxes of anti-aircraft shells to Ham Rong Bridge in Thanh Hoa province. The crates weighed 98 kg — twice her body weight.

Buried all throughout Vietnam, in both well-tended cemeteries and lost locations known to no one, lie the remains of thousands of Vietnamese females who gave their lives so that their homeland could be spared foreign domination.

America’s Vietnam intervention was no “mistake.”   Allegiance to absolute truth over patriotic prejudice forces every honest soul to fully acknowledge that our friends and family members — and, in countless cases, we ourselves — were on the wrong side in a dirty conflict in which the Vietnamese were most definitely the “good guys.”

As we’ve noted, many of them weren’t men at all.

For as long as females have compelling reason to resist male abuses and political or religious constructs rooted in injustice, powerful inspiration will be drawn from what the “beautiful and brave” women of Vietnam did to help guarantee their country’s sovereign self-determination.

Their stirring example will never be forgotten.

I’d favor that idea, except for one crucial aspect.

We’re up to our necks in sucking morasses in both places, and nothing even remotely approximating “victory” can legitimately begin to describe what we’ve accomplished (or, more appropriately, not accomplished).

My mother taught me that allegiance to the truth should always take precedence over blind religious faith or unquestioning fealty to nationalistic myths, so I can’t go along.

Let’s bravely acknowledge, instead, that we got our butts whipped, and announce that we’ll be getting our battered behinds back home, pronto!

If we did so, we’d immediately find that the downward pull of the tar pits in which we’re bogged would ease long enough to extricate ourselves. It wouldn’t be a dignified removal, to be sure, but at least we’d avoid getting swallowed entirely — as both the British and Soviets were in imperialism-killing Afghanistan — when their subjective pride was ultimately, lethally trumped by objective reality.

Getting out now, though far from pretty, would be much better than suffering a catastrophically history-shifting defeat along the aforementioned lines, or the abject humiliation that France endured at the hands of Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu.

Everyone understands that Afghanistan, from the U.S. perspective, is speedily going to Hell in an unraveling hand basket.

But so is Iraq.

Do you not think it’s a sign of failure that our forces there have had to be withdrawn to secure bases beyond Iraqi population centers?

A shameful absence of credible media coverage — or any coverage at all — can’t hide the fact that the last nails are presently being driven into the coffin of U.S. ambition in former Mesopotamia.

Attempting to remain in either country, when actual circumstances powerfully don’t allow it, is an open invitation to disastrous folly.

Republicans argue that we should “do whatever it takes to win.”

What, pray tell, might that be?

We could send to their deaths or terrible maimings just-graduated high school seniors from nearly every town in the USA for endlessly bloody years — at gargantuan monetary cost — and still have just a few blocks of downtown Kabul, or Baghdad, the only safe locations around. Only during broad daylight at that.

Meanwhile, popular antagonism inspired by our heavy-handed occupations would generate fiercely anti-American recruits quicker and more numerously than rain and sunshine give rise to dandelions in springtime.

In other words, we’d just be driving straight toward the ultimate American debacle.

Let’s change the vehicle’s direction, and hold the pedal to the metal as we retreat to rationality and reason.

Our country can save itself from eventual societal disintegration only by completely abandoning its insufferably arrogant, bullying, world-cop attempt to make the rest of humanity over in our corrupt image, by force of indiscriminately discharged arms.

We can’t kill our way to getting others to accept our political, economic, religious, and cultural “values,” which increasing numbers of folks even here at home are rejecting because they’re seen as being hopelessly flawed, if not completely depraved.

Face it. Hardly anyone actually wants to be “just like us.”

And they sure aren’t going to change their minds if we continue to kick down residential doors at midnight or blow up wedding parties with Predator drones, under the cruel assumption that they’re al Qaida gatherings.

We’ve lost. We’ve lost big time.

But nowhere near as massively, tragically, and irreparably as we will if we don’t read the writing on the wall and completely sink beneath that tar, as our purpose suffocates entirely, under the weight of our unrelieved hubris and stupidity.

Yes, the Normandy invasion and the great sacrifice of our own troops was important, but Stalingrad had already sealed Germany’s fate. Thank Russian soldiers for Americans not speaking German, and for U.S. death camps never having been built to “cleanse” our own country of Jews, our racial minorities, plus other “undesirables”.

But that same, seemingly invincible military that saved the whole world some seven decades ago would later be humiliatingly defeated in Afghanistan, repeating Britain’s tragic folly there much earlier.

Afghanistan is the historical death place of overreaching foreign ambition, a reality that stamps a figurative skull and crossbones squarely on whatever vaguely-defined, wishful hope Barack Obama’s Afghan policy possesses.

Put starkly, if we stay in Afghanistan, we, too, are going to catastrophically lose. Think Vietnam, but on an even more disastrous scale of debacle.

Afghanistan combines a just-right amalgam of geographic, religious, and patriotic factors — manifested in the Afghan people’s steely determination to resist conquest, in an ideal defensive setting — to make their land a veritable black hole of doom for foreigners having grand notions of imposing their outside will on a dusty, desolate, yet passionately loved homeland.

Add to that an Afghan continuity stretching back to the beginnings of human habitation on this planet, and it’s reasonable to expect that there will still be an essential Afghanistan long after the USA has morphed, or crumbled, into something pathetically different than its current incarnation.

In fact, attempting to futilely impose arrogant Yankee will on Afghanistan would prove to be a key facilitator of our descent into an American future absent the power and influence, whether real or already largely imagined, that we wield now.

But what of al Qaeda and the Taliban? Are they not scourges that we’re obligated to battle to the bitter end?

Not if the way in which we fight — as alien aggressors in their native midst — provides them additional determination (i.e., a powerful sense of just cause), and our abiding foolishness gives them more recruits than we can ever hope to kill.

How blindly foolish we are in thinking that continued Predator attacks on innocent goat herders and wedding parties can bring us victory.

It’s the same illogic that produced the “it became necessary to destroy the village to save it” madness in Vietnam, and the depraved insanity of believing that constantly kicking down residential doors in Baghdad made us the “good guys” in Iraq.

We have to face facts, distressing though they assuredly are.

The world doesn’t want our religion, politics, economics, or cultural “values” forced upon it, anymore than we’d tolerate some surpassingly hubristic country from half a planet away trying to violently do the same to us.

Twin towers would still be proudly gleaming on the New York City skyline if we had established a prior record of being a true friend and benefactor to humankind, instead of a world-cop bully serving greedily rapacious corporate and financial interests that see Earth’s inhabitants as nothing more than something to be profitably used and abused, or “converted” to what our profoundly problem-ridden society gives us absolutely no valid reason to think anyone else would gladly embrace.

Furthermore, if we scratched just beneath the official story regarding supposedly gratuitous animosity directed against us by so many around the planet, we’d quickly discover that they’re not “enemies” in the diabolical abstract, but people with painful grievances against the U.S. who would have never become such… had we treated them right in the first place.

If we’d only stop getting up in other people’s faces, and quit trying to control their affairs, no one would then stab us in the back when we weren’t looking.

I suspect, however, that we’re too haughty and pious to ever appreciate that truth.

We’ll just self-destructively hurl a monkey wrench into the sputtering engine of our failing order, putting a complete halt to all possibilities for the USA to remain a major power and decisive player in global relations as the 21st Century wears on.

Remember, for instance, when France didn’t support the illegal Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq, a debacle that was incredibly called a “crusade” by our foolish past president, and which has needlessly killed perhaps over a million people.

France and “Old Europe,” where antiwar protests were commonly huge, were condemned by the reactionary Republican base. Who will ever forget the ridiculous absurdity of indignant conservatives renaming French fries “freedom fries”? No wonder goofy Sarah Palin later became their darling.

Well, they’re at it again, claiming that Canadian “socialized medicine” is an unmitigated disaster. It costs a fortune in taxes, they say, and features unacceptable service delays and denials.

But that simply isn’t so, as any fair-minded, honest appraisal readily reveals.

In truth, Canadians pay just a fractionally higher amount in taxes than we do. However, they get a substantially greater public-welfare bang for their buck.

As Rhonda Hackett of the Denver Post put it, “Canadians are afforded many benefits for their tax dollars, even beyond health care (e.g., tax credits, family allowance, cheaper higher education), so the end result is a wash.”

Then there’s the assertion that Canadians allegedly can’t get care when they need it (callously overlooking the plight of 50 million Americans without any medical insurance whatsoever!).

Hackett’s June 7th article also addressed that canard:

There are no requirements for pre-authorization whatsoever. If your family doctor says you need an MRI, you get one. In the U.S., if an insurance administrator says you are not getting an MRI, you don’t get one no matter what your doctor thinks — unless, of course, you have the money to cover the cost.

Most compelling is what a Canadian poster over at Common Dreams recently said:

Last year, I was found to have a genetically defective heart valve that required open-heart surgery. In coming to that conclusion, I underwent several very expensive diagnostic procedures for which there was ABSOLUTELY NO WAITING PERIOD. The operation itself involved a team of surgeons, a team of anestheticists, a team of profusionists and several nurses. Again, ABSOLUTELY NO WAITING PERIOD. After the surgery, I spent ten days in intensive post-op care. The cost in the U.S. — hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cost here in Canada — ZERO.

Desperate to keep their profitable medical stranglehold on the American masses, Big Pharma and insurance giants, with full Republican complicity, are dipping deeply into their bag of dirty tricks.

One of those is a very misleading TV ad currently making the rounds. It features a Canadian woman who went to the United States for purported lifesaving surgery for a brain tumor that Canadian doctors supposedly wouldn’t perform.

In fact, as reported by Julie Mason of the Ottawa Citizen on July 20th, she actually had a “Rathke’s Cleft Cyst on her pituitary gland. To quote an American source, the John Wayne Cancer Center, ‘Rathke’s Cleft Cysts are not true tumors or neoplasms; instead they are benign cysts.’”

The lady was given appropriate appointments with Ontario specialists but chose not to wait the reasonable period. Her resulting surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona cost $97,000.

Interestingly, that case is being pumped by Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, whose state has an average yearly income of just over $37,000. It sure looks like his constituents could use affordable health care!

Perhaps the best-stated case for why our country desperately needs health care change came from Democratic Ohio Congressman and former Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, speaking not long ago to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now:

The insurance companies have almost a death grip on our political system. And they can have so much power that they can exclude 50 million people and trap another 50 million in confiscatory premiums, co-pays and deductibles, just jettison millions of Americans into bankruptcy. And yet, we still have this system. And people are saying, ‘Well, you know, we can’t have a government-run system’ Well, frankly, we tried this system controlled by private insurers, and it’s been a calamity for America.

Let’s quite trashing our friends north of the border, adopt what they and the rest of industrialized humanity have done right, and put an end to the grim reality of routinely seeing “spaghetti feed” fund-raiser signs and collection cans at U.S. supermarket checkouts for grievously ill Americans who can’t afford vital, genuinely lifesaving medical care.

And whose names appear next in newspaper obituaries.

Surely the richest country on earth can do better for its populace.

As I later folded them, small tags told me they were manufactured in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Not one item bore a “Made in USA” label, which is very sad, considering that the unionized needle trades were once a bastion of our country’s labor movement, and that finding attire produced overseas was a rarity just a few decades ago.

All this relates closely to the despicable coup that deposed Honduras’ democratically elected president, Manuel Zaleya.

Although the coup’s initiators say they were motivated by other factors, what really spurred their reactionary ire was Zaleya promoting better pay and conditions for Honduran workers in general, but particularly for the virtual sweatshop slaves whose cruel exploitation by mostly U.S. garment firms has been an utterly obscene profit generator for shameless owners residing in luxury in the North.

It would be extremely naive to think those “foreign” companies, along with others involved in banana and fruit growing, did not facilitate the coup in more than minor ways. It goes without saying, also, that U.S. political conservatives, with operative ties to covert Central American intrigues dating back to the Reagan years, are now malevolently present in Tegucigalpa.

Our nation’s anti-democratic, imperialist role in Central America is nothing new.

Countless religious activists, teachers, clinic workers, union organizers, and ordinary campesinos were brutalized by sordid contras secretly armed and trained by the U.S. under illegal Reagan administration aegis during the ’80s.

Much earlier, however, Yankee pillage of Latin America (as well as other world locales) was already standard operating procedure, as starkly exposed by former Marine Corps Commandant Smedley Butler:

I spent 33 years (in the Marines)…most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City (Bank) boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street…

In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents.

Progressives familiar with people’s history know about the titanic struggle it took to unionize U.S. labor, lifting largely immigrant masses out of deep poverty, winning them the pay, benefits, and conditions that would shape the contours of our storied “good life”.

They know, too, that the most militant unions were purged and broken during the McCarthyite Red Scare, allowing class-collaborationist tendencies to rise, making the decimation of American labor in the aftermath of Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers essentially a cake walk, much to the profitable delight of corporate parasites.

Now our working class — the backbone of society and the creator of all productive wealth — is losing its jobs, homes, health care, pensions, and collective temper on an unprecedented scale.

The savagely exploitative, intensely destructive Walmart labor relations model dominates U.S. life, and everything we buy is produced abroad in oppressive settings where women and children toil long hours for mere pennies. We (and certainly they) are being ground into the dust as a tiny minority of private “entrepreneurs” live high on the hog, via stolen wealth that properly should be used to improve everyone’s living standards.

But capitalism can’t do that.

It’s unable to function in anything but an increasingly rapacious way, shafting majority wage earners ever more painfully, whether through the acute injustice that leaves evicted families on the street in U.S. cities, or Hondurans fearfully facing military repression and a drastic deterioration of their already desperate existence.

As its growing resort to super-exploitation, dictatorial harshness, violence and war clearly proves, capitalism is the intrinsic enemy — not the ballyhooed champion — of fair play, democracy, simple decency, and peace.

Humanity will have no future worth aspiring to if it stays tied to capitalism’s irreparable flaws and fiercely down-pulling restraints.

The rest of this pivotal century clearly must be devoted to building truly democratic, broadly uplifting socialism on a global scale.

It’s the great moral imperative of our era.

The American anti-choice movement was ecstatic, claiming it represented a tremendous victory for “life.”

In cruel reality, it was anything but.

Completely overlooked was the grim fact that, throughout the impoverished Third World, clinics and other entities offering females vital medical attention were also, frequently, the only sources of health care for the general populace.

Thus, when U.S. assistance dried up, those facilities often either dramatically reduced what already inadequate help they were giving — in areas well beyond just women’s issues — or had to close their doors altogether.

We can only guess how many tens of thousands of people, sick from many causes, either suffered grievously or died because of this objectively destructive policy decision.

Thankfully, Barack Obama immediately reversed Bush’s horrendously wrong-headed prohibition, restoring hope to multitudes around the planet.

But anti-choice zealots, typically bereft of reason and rationality, are now viewing our new President as a facilitator of “murder”!

Their misplaced horror over what Obama did was doubled when the White House also rescinded a Bush-era proscription against embryonic stem-cell research, which is key to possibly finding cures for a host of diseases ravaging the human species.

All the anti-choicers can focus on is their fetish-like belief that even a simple zygote can and should be equated with already-born, living, breathing, socially functioning souls suffering in myriad, painful ways by the millions because progressive socio-politico-economic-scientific notions that would be their salvation are thwarted…by powerful reactionary forces of which the “pro-life” cause is a pivotal component.

We’ve all seen how this de facto barbarism works in our own country.

Women or girls who find themselves pregnant against their wishes and then seek abortions are deemed selfish and irresponsible at best, or full accomplices in murder at worst. Their alleged ethical failing is counterpoised with the heavily emphasized innocence of the “baby,” never mind if it’s just an early-stage fetus.

Always absent from this facile fixing of blame is the possibility, very real in countless instances, that the pregnancies in question might be the result of outright criminal rape, or that reprehensible male exploitation of females for sexual use, the “you’ll do it if you really love me” quasi-crime of date rape.

But we’re not supposed to think of such things. They’d rather have us just drive down the highway and be propagandized by those big billboards of cute babies well past birth happily playing with a top or a ball, in a cynical deception that they’re synonymous with what’s “killed” when a desperate female elects to have an abortion.

And don’t worry about the fact that, even before our current economic meltdown began taking a terrible toll on U.S. living standards, a new American baby was born into poverty every 33 seconds.

That circumstance is in no small measure the result of how conservatives, so piously devoted to embryonic life, commonly abandon all concern for life after birth, as it ought to be properly manifested in governmental/societal programs that would eliminate overall poverty, erase male-female income disparities, guarantee affordable day care and health care, or reverse any of countless other incredibly burdensome injustices that, combined, are a leading reason for females asserting, “No way can I have a baby now!”

Clinging to untenable positions wildly at odds with reality is the anti-choice movement’s sad hallmark, along with incendiary rhetoric that leads to violence against abortion providers.

Comprehensive sex education and ready contraceptive availability would unquestionably result in far fewer unwanted pregnancies, plus a great lessening in AIDs and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The very mechanism that would largely obviate much of their almost hysterical abortion concern, quite incredibly, is actually rejected by the anti-choice movement.

Clearly, abortion absurdity and intolerance need to be firmly resisted.

As anyone who just stops to think for a moment can quickly grasp, it isn’t right for somebody else, for whatever imagined reason, to force another person to not have (or have, for that matter) something so personal and difficult to decide upon as an abortion.

It has to strictly be a matter of each pregnant individual’s own decision, based on her assessment of all factors bearing on the situation.

There should be no Taliban-like moral imperialism that effectively demands, “I know what’s best, and you’ll do as I say!”

No deranged “justice” that kills those who actively prioritize women’s rights and health by appropriately and quite morally acceding to females’ pained need to obtain abortions.

We can respect, however, those who wouldn’t have abortions themselves, out of principle, but who are themselves tolerant enough to permit others to reach a possibly contrary decision regarding their own pregnancies.

May we speedily move forward to the badly needed enlightenment that this whole question unquestionably deserves.

Because it’s intrinsically and irreparably greed-driven, capitalism works at vicious cross-purposes with public welfare and the common good. Not only does its cruelly exploitative nature inflict great harm on multitudes around the planet, its private-profit obsession undeniably takes lives.

Routinely and on a massive scale. Here’s how:

1) By refusing to acknowledge the environmentally hazardous impact of its unchecked productive processes, and by staying loyal to lucrative fossil fuels, capitalism has become a lethal, worldwide generator of greenhouse gasses. While global warming is very real and tremendously deadly, anti-scientific factions of the capitalist elite refuse to concede its very existence, or that their profiteering priorities are its evident cause.

Meanwhile polar bears drown and butterflies perish, as bellwethers of what awaits all life if current methods, and relations, of ecologically unsustainable manufacturing and transit aren’t altered.

2) Unable to derive sufficient profits by exploiting their own labor and domestic natural resources, leading capitalist powers (i.e., George Bush’s USA) launch unprovoked wars of acquisitive, domineering aggression. Poor teens, faced with poverty wages and a widespread lack of civilian opportunity, enlist for manipulative incentives to unwittingly be sacrificed in rich men’s dirty conflicts for narrow, corporate gain abroad. They die, or get horrendously maimed, along with victimized innocents in the invaded countries into which they’re wrongfully sent.

3) Corporations seeking more profit close domestic factories rather than offer their employees decent wages, proper benefits, and pensions. They run away to Third World locales where virtual slave labor is utilized. Workers’ families at home consequently suffer, being thrust into hardship, having to abandon health insurance often when its needed the most. We’ve all seen “spaghetti feed” appeals for donations for those who’ve become seriously ill but can’t afford medical care. Then we see their names again, in the obituary pages.

Meanwhile, the super-exploitation at capitalism’s overseas plants is barbaric. Children and young women must toil long hours for just pennies a day. On-the-job accidents, illnesses, and countless sweatshop fatalities lie behind the cheap consumer prices featured at Walmart and other big box retailers dotting our strip malls.

4) Driven from the land by unfair agricultural competition unleashed through NAFTA and similar monopoly-favoring agreements, rural residents of underdeveloped countries lose whatever scant livelihood they had. They’re forced into the grinding poverty of sprawling urban slums.

In desperation, many of them “illegally” migrate to the U.S. Seeking only food for their tables, they’re castigated as criminals, and have to secretly cross the border.

Many die beneath the searing sun of our savage, Southwestern deserts.

5) Needing ideological underpinning for the male dominance that perpetuates capitalism’s patriarchy and its immensely profitable wage differential between men and women doing the same work, no meaningful concession can be made to the idea of female equality. Thus obtaining abortions becomes exceedingly difficult, if not illegal. Ruling-class men piously decide that fetuses should be granted imagined rights that supersede the very real rights of already born, living, breathing, socially functioning females.

Women confronted with unacceptable pregnancies are expected to carry to term, no matter the threat to their own health, and regardless how impossibly difficult objective circumstances surrounding motherhood might be.

A quarter million girls and women succumb around the world annually because abortion is outlawed where they once lived.

6) AIDS claims millions of lives, especially in the poorest nations, whose impoverishment can be traced to their plunder by capitalist colonialism, and where death by hunger and other diseases is already obscenely high.

Back when the spread of AIDS was greatest — heading toward a grim pandemic — selfish pharmaceutical firms wouldn’t provide affordable or free anti-AIDS drugs to the Third World. Most still don’t.

Meanwhile, here at home, the homophobia that joins racism and related biases as useful capitalist means of keeping people divided…kept prompt action from being taken to combat AIDS. In fact, it was initially dismissed as a “gay disease” and “God’s punishment,” not to be interfered with.

7) How many people die from exposure to lethal chemicals, whirling machinery, hidden poisons, locked exit doors at burning poultry plants, exploding coal mines, improperly inspected or repaired airliners, collapsing bridges, etc., because corporations and corporate-beholden government won’t spend money on appropriate safety measures?

Or because they’ve busted unions and hired scabs, thereby grievously diminishing quality control all around?

Capitalism’s stubborn aversion to “regulation” means a prospective death sentence for everyone.

We could go on and on, but we’ll cite just one more outrageous example. Some months ago it was disclosed that Big Tobacco has been increasing the amount of addictive nicotine in cancer-causing cigarettes, the better to profitably hook youth, who will stand a one-in-three chance of ultimately dying from smoking.

Only the universal implementation of public-profit/populist-democratic/cooperative economies based on shared, lasting well being, not devastating rape for short-term private enrichment, can save us.

And our earthly home itself.

That’s why we should look favorably upon the 21st Century socialism that’s being built elsewhere, particularly in Latin America.

It’s the lifesaver everyone needs.

2) We don’t have souls and don’t go anywhere but into the ground to be eaten by worms when we die. Let’s bravely acknowledge that fact.

3) Quit contending that global warming isn’t real. Except for discredited, charlatan “scientists” of the kind who promote Intelligent Design, the overwhelming majority of truly qualified experts agree that manmade greenhouse gases are dangerously heating the planet. Conservatives can’t bring themselves to admit that “liberals” and United Nations types could ever be correct about anything, so they nay-say, sit on their hands, and would allow their grandchildren (and ours) to ultimately perish, fearfully gasping for precious breath.

4) Nationalism sucks. Belief that one’s own country is better or more important than all others has generated massively destructive jingoism and xenophobia through the ages. Combined with religion, it’s been the chief cause of war for bloody centuries. Join me in pledging to never take up arms against anyone on bogus pretexts — or to imagine them inferior, “evil,” etc. — just because they live beyond the ocean, look strange, and have unfamiliar customs.

5) Let’s jettison monopoly capitalism, which is so parasitically harmful that it makes a starving vampire bat seem benign. If we the people took over the economy, democratically controlling it for public profit and common gain, we’d never get robbed at the gas pump again, pay an arm and a leg for medical care or prescription drugs, lose our homes to usurious mortgage thieves, or get sent off to die in meddling neocons’ criminal invasions abroad. Fire the boss! Become a fair-minded owner of America, along with your fellow workers and neighbors!

6) Stop bashing immigrants. Each of our own arriving ethnic groups was accused by existing nativists of stealing jobs, being a societal drain, having criminal and otherwise unsavory tendencies, or spreading disease, just as mostly Hispanic immigrants are condemned today. Such successive discrimination plainly benefited divide-and-conquer corporate profiteers. It was only when ethnicities, races, and genders united — understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all — that the overall U.S. working class made decisive advances and acquired a mutually better living standard.

7) Admit that nothing worthwhile comes from conservatism. It’s abject selfishness masquerading as a valid ideology. Its sole purpose is to perpetuate minority privilege attained through illegitimate power wielded against consequently suffering masses. Conservatives will never utter the word “justice,” for it’s a shattering indictment of their consistently exploitative role in human affairs. Everything good has been fiercely resisted by the political Right: abolishing slavery and child labor, gaining women’s suffrage, struggling to achieve racial equality, raising the minimum wage, implementing progressive taxation, establishing health and safety standards in the workplace and the community at large, just to name a few.

8) Accept that, while abortion isn’t pretty, it’s often necessary. Furthermore, only each female in each specific, unique circumstance has the right to determine what constitutes a legitimate abortion need. No male, or male-dominated institution, should interfere in this most personal and difficult choice. Before guys say one word about the supposed impropriety of terminating an unacceptable pregnancy, they should produce ironclad guarantees about controlling their reckless libidos and keeping their penises in their pants, if that’s where they’re told they should remain.

9) Repeat after me: “Better gay than grumpy.” The only problem with homosexuality is that some straights, insecure about their own orientation, get uptight over it. Most animal species engage in same-sex contact on a minority basis. Therefore it isn’t “unnatural,” just different, and entirely involuntary, like being left-handed rather than right. Besides, aren’t the last six words of the Pledge of Allegiance “with liberty and justice for all”? Quit being hypocrites and get aboard the freedom train!

10) To nurture the collective human spirit, which is quite different than a religious “soul,” think less about what you can personally acquire, in a material sense. Instead, join struggles for shared prosperity. Know that the greatest reward is giving a deprived child reason to laugh. Honor and guard our earthly home. Lie down beside a blade of grass and contemplate its simple magnificence. Then, when relentless age takes its final toll, buy the farm with a contented smile. You lived well. You did the right thing.

Feed those worms and help make that grass grow!

A few days ago, Israel trotted out only an infinitesimally more credible excuse — the Hamas rockets case — as justification for its own murderous shock and awe in Gaza, a long-planned campaign perniciously aimed at ousting a “regime” that came to power via popular, democratic vote.

Yes, such rockets exist, but they’re little more than slingshots against Israel’s incredible military might, and they’re used out of desperation by Palestinians who’ve never been accorded the democratic space within which to gain redress of their eminently just grievances.

Israeli apologists have presented absurd propaganda about those devices.

We’ve been asked, for instance, what would we do if rockets were being launched on our homes in New York or Texas, from Canada or Mexico?

The proper answer is that, if those two nations had been unlawfully occupied or embargoed by the United States for sixty years of relentless oppression and repression, and if all attempts at peaceful change had been forcefully prevented or scuttled by the U.S., then such attacks would be an understandable, indeed justifiable attempt at gaining intolerably deferred liberty.

Our appropriate response wouldn’t be to bomb the hell out of the nearest Canadian or Mexican city, but to collectively look into mirrors and earnestly ask ourselves, “What have we done wrong to incur their wrath?”

And then act to correct the situation.

Conscientious Israelis acknowledge that the Hamas rockets rationale is fraudulent. For instance, Jerusalem Post writer Larry Derfner has noted:

“We don’t want to see how people in Gaza are living, we block it out of our minds — which, I suppose, is natural for a society at war, but which also keeps that war going longer than it might if we would recognize that Gaza is getting so much the worst of it.

“The [Palestinian] Kassam [rockets] have terrorized the 25,000 people in Sderot and its environs, but have caused very, very few deaths or serious wounds. By contrast, Israel has terrorized 1.5 million Gazans, locked them inside their awfully narrow borders, throttled their economy, and killed and seriously wounded thousands of them…

“This is crazy. Israel is the superpower of the Middle East, but because we still think we’re the Jews of Europe in the 1930s, or the Israelites under Pharaoh, we spend a lot more time fighting our enemies than we might if we looked at the whole picture, not just our half of it . . .”

As Gazan hospitals and morgues fill beyond capacity because of an ongoing air assault that cruelly began at precisely the hour when countless children were heading home from school, we’re expected to believe that small craters mostly in empty Israeli fields constitute this terrible episode’s chief sin.

Bugs bothered by sporadically impacting, glorified fireworks cobbled together in backyard garages are ludicrously supposed to be the primary problem, not human limbs and lives escalatingly shattered by the most destructive weapons that military science can produce!

At any point during the past six decades, Israel could have had peace, simply by assenting to the great moral imperative of our time, namely the Palestinians’ right to their own, unitary, sovereign homeland.

Something that Israel continues to resist both tooth and nail, F16 and Apache helicopter gunship.

Two years ago, in Southern Lebanon, Israel engaged in similar bombings in civilian areas. Then, too, it maintained that only “terrorist” targets were being hit. As impartial observers finally ascertained the truth, clear evidence of enormous civilian carnage surfaced.

The Israeli leadership lied then, and it’s lying now.

There’s a veritable holocaust occurring in densely packed Gaza. Think Guernica, or the Warsaw Ghetto, with all the searing irony that comparison involves.

Apart from being an ethical travesty offending all decent hearts, it’s an unpardonable outrage to especially Arab/Islamic peoples around the world.

Witness the angry protest demonstrations in cities across the planet.

It takes no extraordinary analytical prowess to appreciate that, when the White House ridiculously blames what’s currently happening on “thugs” in Gaza, and when moderate Arab states adopt an accomodationist position pleasing the U.S. and Israel, a profound Arab/Islamic radicalization billows and swells.

New Osama bin Ladens are being born as innocents in Gaza are getting ripped to death by American-made Hellfire missiles, dispatched toward fleshly targets by Israeli pilots.

In fact, the almost certain, counterproductive outcome of Israel’s action makes us necessarily suspect that secret motives mistakenly judged by Tel Aviv to be worth the risk are actually at play.

Three possibilities spring immediately to mind:

1) Obscenely using de facto genocide to give the present Israeli government a “tough” image before upcoming national elections.

2) Roping Barack Obama into a harder pro-Israeli stance than Tel Aviv fears he’d otherwise take.

3) Creating a manipulated, intensely propagandized situation that would enable a desired Israeli attack on Iran.

Whatever the most deeply hidden reality, Israel’s gargantuan crime must be universally condemned in the strongest possible terms . . . and halted at once!